Ira Sachs spins his films around the axis of the claustrophobic New York City housing market. In Love Is Strange (2014), John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, in financial difficulty, vacate their apartment and must separately shack up with friends and family. In Little Men, a father’s death opens up for his son an empty Brooklyn apartment above an attached storefront. Unfortunately for the store’s owner, outsiders label the neighborhood ‘bohemian’ which means rents may quintuple, especially now that the neighborhood conscious former owner is gone, and a family newly baptized in fair market value want their due. Sachs, remaining family-focused and New York centered, drops down a generation and shows us the effects of callous inheritance through the eyes of a shy, pubescent teen.

Brian (Greg Kinnear) is an actor who can tell you all about the motivations and real meaning in Chekov’s The Seagull. However, he performs in that sphere somewhere below off-Broadway but above community theater. Moving his family from Manhattan to Brooklyn to hungrily inhale his recently deceased father’s apartment in a ‘rising’ neighborhood, we’re unsure of Brian’s relationship to the old man. Brain cries in the stairwell after the funeral, but he also gets called out by the downstairs shop owner who claims she knows the real story; Brian never came by, rarely called, and has fallen onto the gravy train without the due diligence.

Brain’s son, Jake (Theo Taplitz), is a nervous kid more comfortable around his colored pencils and sketchpad than joining pick-up games at the local basketball court. Jake offers a clue about his family’s relationship with his grandfather as he learns about the death over the phone from a third-string acquaintance calling to ask about the service. Immediately befriending Tony (Michael Barbieri), the son of the downstairs shopkeeper, the two begin one of those friendships you will remember the rest of your life; the one where you had a true best friend around 13 years old and diligently plan the future with.

Jake and Tony want to apply to the same performing arts school, Jake for drawing and Tony for acting. Little Men begins to swirl around its central conflict when the disagreements of the parents trickle down upon the kids. Tony’s mother, Leonore (Paulina García, The 33), cannot afford to sign a new lease with the new price her invading landlords want her to pay. She was very close with Brian’s father and even has family pictures to prove it. Perhaps overplaying her hand in a tense scene with Brian, she shows his father playing with Tony, but where are the pictures of Jake and his grandfather; they don’t exist.

Brian’s wife, Kathie (Jennifer Ehle, Fifty Shades of Grey), is a psychotherapist and sounds like the most condescending woman of the year when she strongly tells Leonore her conflict management skills can solve everybody’s problems if she will merely let her guard down and understand the other side of the story, that her livelihood is unrealistic in today’s world and must make way for progress, and higher lease rates, rather than holding everyone’s potential at bay. How smarmy. We’re here to see little men though, Kathie, and even Leonore, are supporting characters behind their boys.

Right on the precipice of diving headfirst into insanity over females, Tony is far ahead of Jake in solving opposite sex mysteries. Tony itemizes the long list of girls he is interested in, how best to talk to them, and is surprised when Jake shows zero interest or has no idea who he likes. Jake is no doubt a late bloomer, but Sachs hints at something else; Jake may realize he prefers Tony over any girl, but Jake has no idea what any of these feelings mean or what they may lead to. Mind you, none of this is overt; Sachs is strong enough at storytelling to make us guess at all these feelings left unsaid.

Working with Spanish director of photography Óscar Durán, Sachs pauses every 20 minutes or so to step back and watch Jack and Tony ride bikes and rollerblade across Brooklyn’s streets, residential and underneath the tracks. We recognize these 13 year-olds will not be doing this activity for too much longer, for high school looms, but it is an opportunity for Sachs to give the audience a look at Brooklyn, both it’s gentrification and the realization two small boys may safely roam the roads. Little Men is quite similar to Love Is Strange, they both tell New York stories orbiting around housing, and they also fall on the lighter side of forgetful. Little Men sticks to the middle of the road, not too many emotional dramatic scenes, not too many laughs to recall, just a routine family drama exhibiting the issues of the day, opportunism trumps legacy. ​